Intel Alder Lake-S processor fails to impress in DOTA2 benchmark

Although we have a rough idea about what Alder Lake could have in store for us performance-wise, there is very little actual data to verify the claims, which seem to have been sourced from Intel's marketing material. Its solitary UserBenchmark listing tells us very little, as the software may have had trouble correctly differentiating between Alder Lake's performance and efficiency cores. Computerbase.de (via Videocardz) has now stumbled upon an old CapFrameX record of an Alder Lake processor being put through the paces on DOTA2.

The mystery Alder Lake processor, which was clocked at 2.2GHz, appears to have been paired up with some beefy hardware, such as 32GB of DDR5-4,800 RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. Despite that, DOTA2 couldn't go past 189 FPS most of the time. While the maximum framerate did touch 549 FPS at some point, that could have happened while navigating the game's menus. At the lowest point, the game ran at 47 FPS, which is somewhat alarming. DOTA2 isn't the most demanding game around, with its Steam page stating that it can run on any dual-core CPU with 4GB of RAM and a GeForce 860 or AMD Radeon HD 2600.

The problem is further accentuated because DOTA2 does not have an in-game benchmark, so it is virtually impossible to recreate the same test environment. To put things in perspective, we fired up DOTA2, on our testbench (AMD Ryzen 5 3600X at 4.2GHz, 16GB DDR4 RAM at 3,000MHz, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super) with all settings maxed out at 1440p. The game ran at 142 FPS on average, as recorded by CapFrameX. That number dipped to 125 FPS at times, but no lower. DOTA2 also happens to be one of the more CPU-bound games on the market. In all likelihood, it was unable to make sense of Alder Lake's new core configuration, which could explain the somewhat mediocre results. Many apps could need updates to recognize Alder Lake processors, too.